Day: August 4, 2023

Will WiFi Be Replaced?

Meanwhile back to stuff that resembles FYI….

Most of us use WiFi in some form or another….but is it possible that there is something on the horizon that could replace it?

I am so glad you asked.

Wi-Fi might be on the way out even though Wi-Fi 7 is on the way in. According to The Verge, the IEEE standards body that oversees Wi-Fi has released the IEEE 802.11bb light communications standard that will cover the emerging Li-Fi technology. Instead of using wireless network signals, Li-Fi uses invisible (to the human eye, anyway) infrared light to deliver light-based wireless optical connectivity at speeds up to 100 times faster than Wi-Fi.

Light can deliver signals free of radio interference and Li-Fi already has a competing standard, the International Telecommunication Union’s G.9991. The Verge notes that this standard is used with data-beaming bulbs from Signify. Another company called pureLiFi released the Light Antenna One system in February which already meets 802.11bb standards. This is a module that could fit into smartphones and the manufacturer claims that it can deliver data speeds exceeding 1Gbps.

However, Light Antenna One is rated to communicate with devices less than 10 feet away and when transmitting back it has only a 24-degree field of view. Still, the manufacturer of the Light Antenna One says that it is ready “to enable mass integration of Li-Fi for the first time.” Despite the 1Gbps claim from pureLiFi, download data speeds for Li-Fi are said to be as high as 224Gbps which tops the average 40Gbps download speed expected for Wi-Fi 7.

Some of the advantages of Li-Fi includes better security as signals are less likely to leak through walls. Li-Fi transmitters can be easily installed in light fixtures used in offices, and Li-Fi’s higher data speeds certainly would deliver the fast connectivity that Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and gaming devices could benefit from. And besides the faster download speeds, Li-Fi promises to deliver low latencies.

Light Antenna One claims to deliver up to 1Gbps download data speed using Li-Fi - Wi-Fi is old school; get ready for faster, more secure Li-Fi

(phonearena.com)

Whatcha think?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

That Hell Bent Meteor

From time to time I try to be an FYI blog…..giving my readers something besides my usual lip about the government or the situations we find ourselves having to deal with…..here we go another attempt on my part….

Almost weekly we read about this asteroid or that that is coming to our little corner of the universe….mostly they fly by without incident even though it was headed directly for us.

Americans are more worried about an asteroid strike than life on Mars….

Polling more than 10,000 respondents, Pew found that a whopping 60 percent of Americans said their top priority for NASA was to “monitor asteroids [and] other objects that could hit the Earth,” with roughly half of those 10,000 adding that “monitor[ing] key parts of the Earth’s climate system” was among their top desired goals for the agency.

Their fears could very well be a reality….

A comet named 12P/Pons-Brooks is speeding toward us as I type…..

An unusual volcanic comet flying toward the sun appears to have “grown horns” after it exploded, causing it to shine like a small star and shower supercold “magma” into space. It is the first time this comet has been seen erupting in almost 70 years. 

The comet, named 12P/Pons-Brooks (12P), is a cryovolcanic — or cold volcano — comet. Like all other comets, the icy object is made up of a solid nucleus, filled with a mix of ice, dust and gas, and is surrounded by a fuzzy cloud of gas called a coma, which leaks out of the comet’s interior. But unlike most other comets, the gas and ice inside 12P’s nucleus build up so much that the celestial object can violently explode, shooting out its frosty guts, known as cryomagma, through large cracks in the nucleus’s shell.

On July 20, multiple astronomers detected a major outburst from the comet, which suddenly became around 100 times brighter than it usually appears, Spaceweather.com reported. This increase in brightness occurred when the comet’s coma suddenly swelled up with gas and ice crystals released from the comet’s interior, allowing it to reflect more sunlight back to Earth. 

https://www.livescience.com/space/comets/city-size-comet-headed-toward-earth-grows-horns-after-massive-volcanic-eruption

Let’s say instead of passing in close proximity it made a turn and hits the earth….how will we cope?

I am glad you asked.

Let’s say for a moment you want to camp alongside the dinosaurs. But not just any dinosaurs. You want to camp alongside the most famous. The most fearsome. So let’s say you spin the dials on a time machine to 66.5 million years ago and you travel back to the late Cretaceous period.

There’s the tyrannosaurus hunting the triceratops. There’s the alamosaurus, one of the largest creatures to ever walk the earth. There’s the tank-like ankylosaurus crushing opponents with its wrecking-ball tail. And just as you settle down on one particular evening, there’s a brand-new star in the northern hemisphere sky.

The star won’t flash, flare up, or blaze across the horizon. It will appear as stationary and as twinkly as all the others. But look again a few hours later and you might think this new star seems a little brighter. Look again the next night and it will be the brightest star in the sky. Then it will outshine the planets. Then the moon. Then the sun. Then it will streak through the atmosphere, strike the earth, and unleash 100 million times more energy than the largest thermonuclear device ever detonated. You’ll want to pack up your tent before then. And maybe move to the other side of the planet.

The day the Chicxulub asteroid slammed into what is now a small town on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula that bears its name is the most consequential moment in the history of life on our planet. In a prehistoric nanosecond, the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of mammals began. Not only did the impact exterminate every dinosaur save for a few ground-nesting birds, it killed every land mammal larger than a raccoon. In a flash, Earth began one of the most apocalyptical periods in its history. Could you survive it? Maybe.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-survive-a-killer-asteroid

You might want to read this closely for the possibility is there for an asteroid hitting the earth at any time.

Fore armed is fore warned.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Let’s Talk NATO Now

At one time the alliance known as NATO has its place in history….not now for it is nothing more than an extension of the M-IC.

In the beginning, 1949, there was the mission statement….

The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments.
They are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area.
They are resolved to unite their efforts for collective defense and for the preservation of peace and security. They therefore agree to this North Atlantic Treaty.

There was a time when I can see the necessity for this organization….the whole world after WW2 was running scared that the USSR was on a mission to take all of Western Europe after their annexation of Eastern Europe.

In my opinion when the USSR collapsed and was no longer the Russia bear that all feared it was time to dissolve NATO and let Western Europe come up with their own ‘mutual defense’ scheme.

But sadly I was in a minority in those days.

Fast forward to today, 2023….

The alliance is billed as ….’ for the preservation of peace and security’ and that is a con.

At his speech during the NATO Summit in Lithuania, President Biden called the U.S. and Europe “anchors for global security” when in reality there are no anchors during this increasingly dangerous and polarized time of never-ending war in Europe. Our NATO allies are not, as Biden would suggest, anchors in a turbulent sea of demons but rather catalysts stirring the cauldron of war on behalf of US empire.

The instability of the NATO alliance was evident in the controversy over the key issue of Ukraine membership. Biden and his administration tried to work both sides of the street. On the one hand, Biden insisted that “Ukraine’s future lies at NATO.” But then the US teamed up with Germany to make sure the summit made only a vague statement about Ukraine joining when allies agree and “conditions are met,” incurring the wrath of a fuming President Zelensky. Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN that everyone “needs to look squarely at the fact” that allowing Ukraine to join NATO at this point “means war with Russia.”

But this does not mean that Biden, or NATO, are ready to endorse peace talks. On the contrary. The NATO Summit came on the heels of Biden’s much-scorned decision to send banned cluster bombs to Ukraine. And at the Summit, France announced plans to send new long-range strike missiles; Germany announced a new round of military aid, including tanks and artillery shells; and 11 NATO countries pledged to train Ukrainian pilots to fly nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets. In short, Ukraine’s Zelensky walked away from the NATO summit with a declaration of years of military subsidies, a virtual blank check to make Ukraine a forever proxy to maintain US hegemony. As NATO members send Ukraine more and more destructive weapons, the terrifying possibility of a wider war, even a nuclear war, casts a shadow over the entire globe.

NATO Is a Warfare Alliance, Not a Force for Global Peace or Stability

This organization has been a war alliance since the mid-90s when it started expanded beyond the borders of Western Europe.

The Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Ukraine all wars….not a bit of ‘peace and security’ in them all.

Does the US and NATO want all this war or does it want something else?

NATO is taking the place of the UN….at least the UN does attempt at peaceful resolution….not so with NATO it is expansion and intervention on a grand scale.

Time for this alliance to go the way of the do-do….I know not likely to occur for there is way too much cash in war dividends for it to consider anything other than war.

That said could this Ukraine thing derail NATO (finally)….

Both prongs of Biden’s strategy – sanctions and military action by proxy – were, it is now clear, delusional. The first, famously expecting to reduce the ruble to rubble and to push the Russian economy ‘back to the stone age’, had become a manifest failure by the end of 2022 if not earlier. As for the second, despite the billions in military assistance, despite exhausting Western weapons stockpiles, despite discovering the quantitative and qualitative limits to Western weapons production capacities notwithstanding astronomically expensive military industrial complexes, despite ever more deadly weapons now including cluster bombs, despite reliance on neo-Nazi battalions, despite US and Ukrainian willingness to incur macabre levels of Ukrainian and mercenary casualties, it has been clear for some time that Ukraine is losing and has no prospect of winning.

President Biden acknowledged this in his turnaround on offering Ukraine membership of NATO or even giving it a timetable for the same and his new-found insistence that not only should things not be made easy for Ukraine to join, not only should Ukraine demonstrate progress on requisite reforms, but it should conclude a peace treaty with Russia before it can join NATO, a point repeated more than one by Jens Stoltenberg at Vilnius.

(antiwar.com)

And the waste goes on….

After Ukraine where will NATO expand?

It has become this enormous empire…..an empire of war.  Will it try to turn to the Far East in the future?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”